Day 32: Hadleigh to Asfordby, Tuesday January 11th
As we head towards Asfordby, I reckon that there will be time to write the blog before we get there. Then with a bit of luck, I will be able to post the last few days tonight. I’m not counting on it though as I am finding internet access more difficult than I had anticipated.
We left Hadleigh about 9:30 and were in Blunham by lunchtime. The first part of the drive was along a narrow country road edged by hedgerows – just charming. From mid morning though, we ha ve been on more major roads which are not nearly so charming but the bonus is that our progress is faster.
Our hopes for Blunham to be more productive in terms of ancestry were thoroughly dashed. The gravestones were just as illegible as those in Hadleigh – just faster to get around as there were not nearly so many. We were really surprised with Blunham. Having expected it to be a sizeable town where we could get lunch etc, we found it to be really lacking in shops. It had quite a few houses, most of them reatively new and substantial, but next to nothing in retail. There are two pubs, one local store which is closed for the winter and a butcher shop in the front window of a house which is in one of the residential streets! There is one church – the Anglican church which has existed since 1200!!! Poet John Donne was one of the rectors there. This has the graveyard that we scoured in vain for some Peck graves.
Blunham is the town in which John Peck was born and where he worked as an agricultural labourer until 1853 when he migrated to Australia. It was he who married Maryann Nunn (see yesterday’s blog) in 1854. They were married in St James Old Cathedral, William St Melbourne, just a few months after John had arrived in Melbourne. We do not think that they knew each other back here in England, so obviously they were fast workers.
Agan we found the church open so we spent some time in there. We have been all afternoon on the road to Asfordby which is some way past Leicester. We are travelling on the main south-north freeway, the M1. We seem to be coming across places to pull over for petrol/coffee/toilets very frequently – every 10-20 km or so. One that we pulled into is called ‘Welcome Break’ and there they have a food court, newsagency, several coffee shops etc as well as the petrol. We wonder if that idea will catch on in Australia. We notice that Starbucks has really caught on here – they are a dime a dozen.
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Now we are here in Asfordby at the B&B that Chris and Cathy recommended. It was dark when we got here so we haven’t yet explored but it is next to the church where we are hopeful of finding Henry Heazlewood’s grave. This B&B is, I would say, the original house, so it has a bedroom, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. It has been nice to relax in the lounge watching TV for the first time in a month.
We have been watching on the news, the coverage of the floods in Brisbane. What a devastation with now eleven people dead and about seventy missing. Will summer in Australia ever be free of natural disasters?
Tomorrow we will explore Asfordby and then move on to Bourton on the Water in the Cotswalds.
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